Thursday, September 13, 2012

Review: Klonopin Lunch by Jessica Dorfman Jones

The midlife crisis hits at age 30 in this have-it-all, do-it-all, got-it-covered, but not, Generation X memoir.

Jessica has it all: handsome husband, wealth, good job at the top of
her field, and youth. It is not enough, and her job will probably end
soon. She is bored with her life and her marriage and Andrew, her
husband, has settled into a respectable and well-furnished rut. She
wants more. She needs more.

She thinks she needs more.

Enter guitar teacher, Gideon, bad boy rocker by night, guitar
teacher by day, and sex all the time. He is just what Jessica needs to
help shake up her life and drive away boredom with tequila shots and
chaos. Casting aside everything for a walk on the wild side where sex,
drugs, and rock and roll are the order of every day, Jessica takes the
plunge.

What? Another sex, drugs, and rock and roll drug fest chased with
alcohol and regret? Do we really need yet another thirty-something
remembrances of things past with attitude and arrogance? Yes. We need Klonopin Lunch
and Jessica Dorfman Jones’s humor and pathos to remind us what we have
to lose—and to gain—in a world where everything grows old in time, even the desire for excess and eccentricity.

Normally, I avoid drugged out memories fueled by sex and alcohol to
the beat, beat, beat of rock and roll, but this memoir is something very
different. There is a touch of arrogance and privilege in Jones’s tour
through depravity and boredom that is overlaid with killer wit, laugh
out loud moments, the bitter dregs of the morning after, and an
excellent sense of timing and well written prose that makes Klonopin Lunch
is more than just a memoir of yet another generation X-er with too much
money and too much time on her hands. I thoroughly enjoyed Jones’s
self-deprecating wit and razor sharp delivery. Jessica Dorfman Jones has
the goods and she pays off with style and a flair for the wickedly
funny.